John Lee Hooker Quotes

I want to see what I look like when I'm old - I'm curious where that's going to take me.

One day you look out and the audience consists of 65,000 people. It's like looking in the mirror and one day you realise you've gone grey.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

I've grown up with kids watching me and as they're growing up, I'm growing up.

Now, twenty years old, I come out and I go back to Greenwich Village. Now, of course, I'm a wealthy man.

When you grow up in the music industry, trying to be Britney Spears because that's what sells records and then you realize, 'All I have to do is be myself? I should have thought of that a long time ago,' it feels good to have success come from what's actually inside of you.

Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

I came into this music business at 26 years old. I was a fully developed man at that point. At that age, I didn't have anything to prove.

I was doing our first album when I was 19. It came out as a hit, and I blinked - then 37 years went by. There's a lot of stuff that happened in there, but once the snowball started going down the hill, I took the ride.

It's 33 years since we drew Wham! to a close and a lot of people's perspectives have changed and a lot of the rough edges have been knocked off.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.

When I think about myself at 15, I can't relate to myself at all. I thought I knew everything.

There was confusion since I stood here 35 years ago.

It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.

From Bonheur de Vivre - I was thirty-five then - to this cut-out - I am eighty-two - I have not changed; not in the way my friends mean who want to compliment me, no matter what, on my good health, but because all this time I have looked for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.

It's funny because when you do become successful, you're forced to look backwards and try to crawl back into the womb where you first started to create.

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

Its funny because when I did feel like I came out and I just felt like I was being truthful to myself, (it was at) that point I became very successful. So you know, it took a true kind of facing that truth of myself and being honest, that was when the real kind of fame or whatever that kind of stuff happened for me.

I've been around a long time, and it seemed for the longest time like I was the young guy. Now, all of a sudden, I've got fans with beards telling me, "I used to watch you when I was a kid." So, I don't know what happened to all those years, but the little bit I do remember? It was definitely a fun ride.

You shouldn't change what you are in the search for success.

Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.

This is a new point in my life, and things are totally changing. But like the sunsets I saw on Tybee Island, the miles I’ve already gone are going to stay with me.

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in / There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin / He says, 'Son, can you play me a memory?/ I'm not really sure how it goes / But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.'

When you’re young you just run, but you come back to what you need.